


An Island Unto Himself

by nagi_schwarz



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Sneaky Crossover, Supernatural Summergen Fic Exchange 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 06:39:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8152582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: Written based on two prompts. 1) Castiel gets de-aged physically (with or without mentally de-aging) and Sam and Dean have care for Castiel. They are besides themselves as they try to care for him while trying to find a way to return him to his former self. 2) Dean and Sam find themselves stranded on a dangerous island. They find themselves with no weapons. They are being stalked by something dangerous and the boys have to figure out what creature it is and find a way to fight against it plus to find a way home. Tiniest crossover with the Stargate Multiverse (Amanda Tapping played Samantha Carter in Stargate and Naomi in Supernatural.) Set in Season 9 before Road Trip. Blink and you miss it SGA quote.





	1. Chapter 1

“We have a problem.”  
  
Dean looked up from the book he was studying. Sam didn’t use that phrase lightly. “What’s up?”  
  
Sam held out his cell phone. “Listen to this.” He played a voicemail message.  
  
An unfamiliar woman said, “Hi, this is Cassandra Chapman from Child Protective Services in El Paso County, Colorado. I’m looking for any known relatives of a child who identifies himself as James Castiel Novak. He’s about five years old, and he says his father left him, and his brothers and sisters have abandoned him, but he thinks he has an Uncle Dean in Kansas, and this was the number he gave us. He’s been placed in an emergency foster home, but we like to have children placed with kin if at all possible. Please call me back.”  
  
And she rattled off a phone number.  
  
“A child?” Dean asked. He flinched instinctively whenever he heard _Child Protective Services_ , had gone to great lengths as a kid to make sure he and Sam never ended up in their clutches.  
  
“It gets better,” Sam said, and played the next message.  
  
A piping child’s voice intoned, with Castiel’s awkward and flat inflection, “Sam, Dean, it’s me, Castiel. I need you to come find me. Something happened. I’m a child, and it is very distressing. I’m in Colorado Springs.”  
  
“That’s a new one,” Dean said.  
  
Sam sighed. “It’s entirely possible. Cursed artefact. Fountain of youth. Maybe Cas got body-swapped with a child, like that one time with me and that kid Gary.”  
  
“Social services won’t let us take him,” Dean said. “We’re both legally dead. And before that we were wanted by the FBI. Hell, the FBI had us in Colorado. Showing our faces there is just asking for arrest.”  
  
“Cas is human,” Sam said. “And he’s out there alone.” He pursed his lips in disapproval; they’d had words more than once about the fact that Dean had sent Cas away. Sam still didn’t know why. He didn’t know about Ezekiel inside him either. “If he’s been turned into a child, he’s extra vulnerable.”  
  
Dean sighed. “Okay, fine. But we need a pretty damn good ruse. And maybe a disguise.”  
  
  


*

  
  
Dean drove the entire six hours from Lebanon to Colorado Springs while Sam hit the Internet in search of procedures for how to obtain a child in state’s custody. The entire way, Dean alternated between fretting about getting arrested and thrown in jail and what was happening to child Cas in the clutches of the evil, evil Child Protective Services. How were they even going to get into the building without getting slapped into cuffs and locked away forever? Sam got Charlie on the phone and asked her to fake up documents for them - credit history, job history, police records - a few traffic tickets - medical history, insurance, tax history, ownership of their own home in Lebanon. They were Sam and Dean Smith, residents of Lebanon, Kansas. Dean was a mechanical engineer. Sam was a librarian. They were related to James Castiel Novak through his mother, who had died just after he was born.   
  
“It's enough to pass a federal background check for a child but not much else,” Charlie said. “Good luck. Send pictures of the little guy.”  
  
Sam thanked her and made a note in his phone to swing by the post office and pick up the package of credentials she was sending their way.  
  
It was the middle of the night when they got to Colorado Springs, and they shelled out a little extra for a nicer motel so they wouldn't look too shady if the social worker wanted to see where they were staying. Sending Sam and Dean in together was just asking to be recognized, so Dean agreed to go in alone. Despite having more law enforcement after him, he was less recognizable because he was shorter.   
  
Dean stared at the website Sam had pulled up about dealing with social services. “This is going to be impossible.”  
  
Disguising Dean and getting into the El Paso County Social Services office was simple enough. A fake pair of Buddy Holly glasses, judicial application of hair gel, and a button-down shirt and khakis turned Dean into a responsible-looking adult. As it turned out, getting Cassandra Chapman - short, stout, motherly, but young-looking - to let him see Cas was the easy part.   
  
“Tell me about James.” Cassandra’s desk was crammed into a small cubicle in a beehive of cubicles in an open bullpen where all the other social workers were stationed.   
  
“He goes by Cas, actually. He’s a nice kid, a bit...odd. His older brothers think he has - what's that thing? Like Autism, only not as bad. Where he’s a little awkward and bad at social cues.”  
  
“Asperger’s,” Cassandra said sympathetically. “He answers to Jimmy sometimes.”  
  
“That's new,” Dean said, and filed that away for later.   
  
“Are his parents like this? Prone to just - leaving him?”  
  
“His mom died right after he was born,” Dean said. He looked away. “Our big sister.” He swallowed hard. “His dad was always a deadbeat, though. Cas’s oldest brother Michael basically raised him.”  
  
“He said his brothers and sisters abandoned him. How many siblings does he have?” Cassandra was taking notes.   
  
“His dad kind of, uh, got around, and I could never keep track of all the kids he had. I really only knew Michael and Gabriel. And Luke. That guy was a jerk. I wasn't surprised when Luke didn't answer his phone, but for the other two not to is so bizarre. I mean, we're not that close, because they're not my sister’s kids. Cas was kind of a surprise baby, and we only saw him a handful of times, but we always liked him.”  
  
Cassandra nodded for him to keep going.   
  
“I guess maybe those boys were more like their father than any of us wanted to think.” Dean cleared his throat. “Where did you find him?”  
  
“Walking along the side of I-70,” Cassandra said. “He was wearing a suit and a tie and a tan gray overcoat. He said he was coming to find you. He said he hadn’t been alone long, but he couldn’t tell us his address or phone number, just yours.”  
  
Damn. Cas had been completely shrunk, clothes and all.  
  
“Can I see him?” Dean asked.  
  
Cassandra nodded. She made Dean surrender a copy of his driver’s license - the one Charlie had faked up for him and overnighted - to be copied, made him fill out a form for his background check, and then she drove him over to the foster home. It was in a nice suburban neighborhood at the base of Cheyenne Mountain. There were kid bicycles and scooters scattered on the lawn and a basketball hoop over the garage door. Cassandra parked, and she and Dean went to ring the doorbell.  
  
The foster mother, Leann, was a pretty woman, in her late thirties, with red-blond hair and bright green eyes. “Cassandra, so good to see you.”  
  
“Leann, this is Dean, Jimmy’s uncle,” Cassandra said, and Dean shook hands politely.  
  
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for the little guy,” Dean said, trying to project Sam’s sincerity as much as possible.  
  
“He’s in the back with the other kids. Come on in.”   
  
Leann’s house was warm and homey. She had pictures of seemingly dozens of kids on the walls. Dean picked his way carefully around several piles of toys - Leann hollered for someone named Victor to come clean up his mess - and followed Leann and Cassandra through the kitchen, out a sliding door, and onto a broad, expansive lawn. The kind of lawn he’d enjoyed playing on when he was a kid.  
  
He knew Castiel immediately, even though he was wearing a Snoopy shirt and little cargo shorts, because he was sitting on one of the swings, not swinging, and watching the other children with laser-intense focus.  
  
“Cas,” Dean said, and the boy - he didn’t look much older than five - rose up immediately, headed toward Dean.  
  
“What took so long?” Cas demanded, coming to stand before Dean and gazing up at him, uncaring of the height difference.  
  
Dean knelt so they were eye-level. “We drove all night.”  
  
“Fix me,” Cas said.  
  
Leann cast Cassandra an anxious look. “He’s been saying that over and over. That he wants to be fixed. But he won’t tell me what’s broken.”  
  
Dean said, “Sam and I will do our best, all right? You know Sam’s the best at research. We’ll make sure to get you fixed up right as rain.”  
  
Cassandra cast him a questioning look, but he shook his head, mouthed, _Later._  
  
Cas frowned at him. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child. I’m not a child.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Dean said sincerely. “You just look like a child, remember?”  
  
Castiel frowned but appeared resigned to his fate. “I remember.”  
  
Dean stood up, turned to Cassandra. “What now?”  
  
She beckoned him away from Cas’s hearing.  
  
“The shelter hearing is on Monday,” she said. “If his father can’t be reached before then, the judge will probably continue the hearing to try to get him served.”  
  
“That guy ran off a dozen times when his other kids were growing up,” Dean said. “Good luck finding him. Why can’t Sam and I just take him home?”  
  
“Well, he’s under the jurisdiction of the court here.”  
  
This was the moment Dean needed Sam, but Sam had made him drill this part over and over again. He could do it. He had a GED and a give ‘em hell attitude. “I don’t understand why. Cas isn’t from Colorado. The entire family is from Illinois.”  
  
Cassandra blinked. “Oh. Jimmy didn’t say. He couldn’t tell us where he was from.”  
  
Dean fired up his smartphone and opened up the web browser app. He found the exact image Sam had tracked down for him, one of the missing posters Amelia Novak had made for her husband in the year Cas was helping them unintentionally open Lucifer’s cage.  
  
“See? This isn’t the first time Jimmy’s dad’s gone walkabout.”  
  
“Wow. The resemblance is uncanny.” Cassandra sighed. “Poor kid. Look, I’d have to talk to my attorney, but if Jimmy - Cas - is from Illinois, then we’d have to send him back there. You said you’re from Kansas, though. You’d run into the same problems there that you would here as far as being able to take custody of him.”  
  
“We’ve taken care of Cas before.” That was the utter truth. “We can keep an eye on him till his dad shows up.”  
  
“That’s the problem,” Cassandra said. “Cas can’t keep going back and forth between caregivers. He deserves stability, permanency.”  
  
Dean sighed. “Truth is, his dad probably wouldn’t notice if we just kept him. Wouldn’t care.”  
  
“That’s got to be damaging to Cas.”  
  
“Has Cas talked about his dad at all? About missing him or wanting to see him?” Dean asked.  
  
Cassandra turned to Leann.  
  
She shook her head. “Unless I ask, he never talks about his father, and he only tells me that his father is gone. He reports his older brothers fight all the time. Mostly he talked about you, Dean.”  
  
He took a deep breath, summoned the rest of the words Sam had drilled into him. “Even though we didn’t get to see the kid much, we’re the most stable adult presence he’s had in his life, squabbling brothers aside. We can give him stability and permanency. We can get custody of him back in Kansas, or even in Illinois. Let him stay with us. Being in foster care can’t be good for him either. I know Leann is doing a fine job, but we’re family.”  
  
“I need to consult my attorney.” Cassandra sounded genuinely apologetic. “But you might be able to take him home after court on Monday.”  
  
“Can we take him out to lunch or something?” Dean asked. He glanced at Leann.  
  
She shrugged. “Sure. Just don’t give him too much sugar.”  
  
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Dean flashed her his most charming smile.  
  
Leann helped Cas into a jacket and some little sneakers - he looked unexpectedly vulnerable in kids’ clothes - and she and Cassandra put him into a booster seat in the back of the car. Dean texted Sam the plan - and the address of a nice diner in town - and told him they’d meet at the diner.  
  
On the drive to the diner, Cassandra explained that she would have to supervise the lunch visit as a matter of policy. Dean nodded, although he wasn’t pleased, because that just meant performing for even longer, but he could pretext as well as the next hunter. Sam, of course, was just too good at coming across as kind and trustworthy. Right after Cassandra parked behind the diner, Sam climbed out of the Impala, and Cassandra’s eyebrows went up when she watched Sam unfold himself from the front seat.  
  
But then Sam was offering his hand and doing his dewy-eyed thing, and Dean knew they had it made when Sam knelt and helped Cas out of the booster seat and Cas actually initiated a hug with him, awkward though it was. The soft look on Cassandra’s face said it all.  
  
In the diner, Cassandra insisted on paying for her own meal and sitting at the booth adjacent to theirs rather than with them; she was there only to observe, not to interfere.  
  
Dean ordered a burger, ignoring Sam’s sharp look, but he let Sam order Cas something healthy off the kids’ menu.  
  
“Are you all right?” Sam kept his voice gentle and solicitous. For some reason, Cas didn’t look offended. Probably because he knew Sam was a big softie.  
  
“My current circumstances are less than ideal,” Cas said.  
  
“Is your foster home all right?”  
  
“Leann is more than adequate as a parent, but it’s not a parent I need.”  
  
“What is it you need?” Sam asked.  
  
“To be fixed.”  
  
Dean darted a glance at Cassandra, but she didn’t seem too alarmed by Cas’s words, probably because they weren’t new to her.  
  
“How did you get broken?” Somehow Sam was able to sound both like he was humoring a child and like he was taking Cas completely seriously all at the same time. Had he learned that at Stanford?  
  
“I was seeking shelter in a storage shed,” Cas said, and Dean winced.  
  
Sam, however, looked sorrowful, smoothed a hand over Cas’s hair gently.  
  
Cas looked puzzled by the gesture but didn’t complain.  
  
“Go on,” Sam said.  
  
“I picked the shed because it was largely unoccupied,” Cas said, “and it was. There was but one item inside.”  
  
“Can you describe it to me?”  
  
“It was a platform shaped like a cog. I didn’t think much of it, but when I touched it, it illuminated, and it displayed a double helix.”  
  
“Did it make any sounds?”  
  
“Just a faint humming, likely from some power source I couldn’t see.”  
  
“Did you notice any smells?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“And then what happened?”  
  
“And then I was like this.”  
  
Dean darted another glance at Cassandra. She looked amused, more than anything. She probably thought Cas just had a hyperactive imagination.  
  
“Did it hurt at all?” Sam asked.  
  
“No. I suspect, if we can relocate the device, I can be fixed.”  
  
“We’ll work on that,” Sam promised, and then the food arrived.  
  
Cas wasn’t inclined to make conversation while he ate, tearing into his food like a ravenous dog, which prompted Sam to ask if he was being fed properly, and resulted in Cas talking with his mouth full to explain all the new foods Leann had given him to try and how homemade food was definitely better than diner food.  
  
Dean was grateful for the opportunity to basically stay quiet and eat.  
  
After the meal, Cassandra let Castiel ride in the back of the Impala in the booster seat, and they followed her back to the social services office so Sam could also sign some paperwork to get a background check started.  
  
While Sam was filling out the paperwork and poking through his wallet for his fake driver’s license, Dean knelt on the ground beside Cas.  
  
“I know this sucks,” he said in a low voice, “but you need to pretend to be a kid as much as possible. If you don’t, they’ll think you’re too crazy for us to handle and they won’t let us have you, all right?”  
  
Cas sighed. “Jimmy’s memories of childhood are difficult to understand. I was never a child. I have no frame of reference. I cannot -”  
  
“Just pretend you need our help a lot, okay?”  
  
“Fine.”  
  
Sam was just handing the signed background check form over to Cassandra when a familiar woman’s voice rose over the din of the social services office.  
  
“Cassandra Chapman?”  
  
Sam, Dean, and Cas turned.  
  
Dean’s jaw dropped. It was Naomi. Only she was blonde and wearing jeans and a blouse and a black leather jacket, and she looked way less uptight than Naomi ever had. Was the woman just Naomi’s meat suit? How much would she have remembered from being possessed by Naomi?  
  
Dean immediately lowered his head, averted his gaze, and Sam did the same.   
  
Cas, however, was still staring.  
  
Cassandra, halfway out of her cubicle, paused. “Can I help you?”  
  
The woman reached into her jacket, and Dean tensed, ready for a weapon, but she held up an ID.  
  
“I’m Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter, United States Air Force. I need to speak to you about a child who got into one of our secure storage lockers in the last couple of nights.”  
  
Sam raised his eyebrows, caught Dean’s eye. So Cas had stumbled on some kind of military tech, not something supernatural?  
  
“Do you have the child’s name? Have you filed a report with the police?” Cassandra’s expression was shrewd, calculating.  
  
Carter shook her head. “No, just a screenshot off of the security feed.” She unfolded a piece of paper and showed it to Cassandra. “I’m less interested in the child and more interested in if he can identify the adult who was with him.”  
  
Dean nodded at the nearest exit sign. Time to go. He’d shown Cassandra that missing poster for Jimmy Novak. If this Carter woman had a picture of adult Cas from the security footage, Cassandra would recognize him immediately.  
  
“Unfortunately,” Cassandra said, “I cannot allow you to speak to any of my clients - confidentiality. I’m sure you understand. But I can make inquiries for you and send you anything I do learn.”  
  
“I’d appreciate that.” Carter handed over a business card. “Have a nice day.” She turned and left the office without spotting any of them.  
  
As soon as she was out of earshot, Cassandra came to speak to them. She knelt so she was eye-level to Cas.  
  
“Hey, buddy, you said you slept in a shed the other night. Was your dad with you?”   
  
Cas shook his head. “No, my father was not with me. He has not been with me for years. And that woman is a liar. She wanted me to hurt Dean.”  
  
Cassandra blinked and looked up at Dean.  
  
Dean sighed. “Cas, maybe she just looked like Naomi -”  
  
“That _was_ Naomi,” Cas insisted. “I’d know her face anywhere.”  
  
Dean looked at Sam. Sam shrugged helplessly.  
  
“Naomi your sister?” Cassandra asked.  
  
“She told me I had to forget Dean, that he wasn’t my friend, that I wasn’t allowed to have friends, that I had to - to -” Cas burst into tears.  
  
Panic rose in Dean’s chest. What was he supposed to do? When he was a kid, he’d always just patted Sam on the shoulder and told him to man up, soldiers don’t cry, and Sam, hiccuping, would swallow down his sobs and nod, pick himself up and keep going.  
  
But Jimmy was in there, Dean realized. Cas said he had Jimmy’s childhood memories tangled up in his graceless soul.  
  
Sam reacted better, pulled Cas into his arms and held up, rocking him gently, humming under his breath. Humming ‘Hey Jude’.  
  
Cassandra beckoned Dean aside, and he followed her.  
  
“Dean, what is going on?”  
  
“I think Cas is just really upset. That woman’s resemblance to Naomi is uncanny, yes, but she’d have recognized the man in the photo as Cas’s father immediately if she really was Naomi.” Dean shook his head. “He’s really confused and mixed up.”  
  
“Is there a chance Cas’s father did go to the shed?”  
  
“Who knows what that guy does.” Dean shook his head in genuine disgust. “If he had gone, I’m frankly not surprised he just left Cas there.”  
  
“How would a child get into a secure military installation?”  
  
“I’m guessing it wasn’t all that secure,” Dean said wryly.  
  
Cassandra sighed. “This case just gets stranger and stranger. I’ll take him back to Leann’s. Can you stick around till court on Monday?”  
  
“Absolutely,” he said. Not a chance, he meant.  
  
“Come say goodbye to Cas, and we’ll see you on Monday.”  
  
Cas had calmed down by the time they returned, wiping at his face and nodding solemnly at Sam’s reminders to brush his teeth and be good. Dean offered Cas a hug as well, and then they accompanied Cassandra to the parking lot so they could transfer the booster seat from the Impala to Cassandra’s state car. They watched him drive away, waving when he turned around to look at them.  
  
“So?” Sam asked. “Kidnapping?”  
  
Dean nodded. “Kidnapping.”  
  
  


*

  
  
It was a damn good thing they’d decided to retrieve Cas that night, because when they got to Leann’s house, there was already an anonymous black van parked across the street from it that had _government_ written all over it. Dean parked the Impala further down the street, cut the lights, and he and Sam waited. And waited.  
  
“Did you tell him?” Dean asked.  
  
“For the hundredth time, yes.” Sam was sipping coffee and watching the van idly. “At three a.m., Cas will get up, open the front door, and come on out. We still have another forty minutes to go.”  
  
One of the barn doors at the back of the van swung open, and five people spilled out onto the street. All of them wore black tac gear and night vision goggles, carried military-grade assault weapons. Two of them were female, three of them were male. One of the females was definitely Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter. One of the males was built like a mountain.  
  
“I think that forty minutes just got cut down to zero.” Dean reached for his gun, made sure it was cocked. He and Sam watched the five figures spread out to circle the house. They moved silently, in perfect synchronization. They were definitely pros. What the hell was going on in Colorado Springs, that the military had some kind of installation with crappy security that housed devices that turned adults into kids? And why the hell would an installation have security that bad but have special ops teams on hand to do the clean-up from a security breach?  
  
Once the black-clad figures started closing in on the house, Dean nodded to Sam, and the two of them exited the car silently.   
  
“I’ll handle the distraction,” Dean said. “You get Cas.”  
  
Sam nodded.  
  
Together they approached the house, weapons drawn, on alert. The five figures had already made it inside, leaving one male to guard the window they’d jimmied open.  
  
Dean wasn’t planning on going in that window. Instead, he headed up the front steps and rang the doorbell.  
  
There was a pause, and then - bingo. A light went on inside the house.  
  
There was a scream, the sound of breaking glass. Chaos. More screaming.  
  
Dean turned and ran for the car, not daring to look back. He dove into the driver’s seat and slammed the key into the ignition, hunkered down.  
  
Thirty seconds later, Sam threw himself into the passenger seat, shoved a sleepy Cas into the back seat, threw a blanket over him, and Dean started the engine. He kept the lights off, sped away as fast as he dared. In the rearview mirror, he saw five black-clad figures running for the van.  
  
“How long do I have to stay down here?” Cas asked, voice muffled beneath the blanket.  
  
“Till we get you a real booster seat,” Sam said.  
  
  


*

  
  
They had to buy clothes and supplies for a child, including a booster seat. Sam checked the news constantly for an Amber Alert about missing Little Cas, but by the time they reached the Wyoming border, there was still none.   
  
“Not taking any chances,” Dean said. He and Sam took turns going into gas stations or convenience stores so no one saw them as a pair. They made sure that only one of them was ever seen with Cas when they had to do things like escort him to the bathroom for potty breaks. And when it came time to hit up a Walmart for the full shopping experience, they split up. Entered the store separately, different entrances, different times. Sam picked up food and a stuffed animal, because even though Cas wasn’t a kid, Jimmy was, and he manifested himself at random moments.  
  
(“I thought Jimmy was dead,” Dean said, peering into the back seat where Cas curled beneath the blanket and sleeping fitfully, calling out for Mommy.  
  
“Angels have no mommy,” Sam said. “Memories are physiological, not just metaphysical. The machine didn’t transform him into a brand new child; it turned back the clock and made his vessel what it was before, memories and all.”)  
  
Dean handled the clothes shopping. Between shopping for Sam as a kid, then dealing with Ben and then Lisa’s niece, he had a better sense of what a kid needed physically. He bought a hat for Cas to cover his hair, and then a pair of little sunglasses. On a whim he bought some jeans and a cool-looking little leather jacket, because if Cas looked cute and dressed up no one would look weirdly at the hat and sunglasses, like Dean was trying to disguise him.  
  
Which he was.  
  
He solicited help from a pleasant-looking middle-aged woman with six kids, ranging from Cas’s age on up to about fifteen, explained that he’d been given emergency custody of his sister’s kid and had zero kid supplies and would she help him figure out what kind of booster seat he needed?  
  
The teenage girls fussed and cooed over Cas, who stood there in his new rebel-without-a-cause outfit and suffered through their attentions in silence while Dean and the woman picked out a booster seat.  
  
When Dean got back to the Impala with clothes, shoes, a booster seat, and Cas in the shopping cart, Sam was already there. He’d unloaded the groceries and was in the passenger seat, nonchalant as can be. Dean unloaded his supplies himself, installed the booster seat, buckled Cas into it, and gave him the stuffed bunny Sam had bought.  
  
Then they were back on the road once more.  
  
“I only got him a week’s worth of stuff,” Dean said. “Just to be safe. Pretty sure we’ll get him fixed before then, though. Right, Cas?”  
  
In the back seat, Cas was cuddling the bunny and fast asleep.  
  
“He was changed by a machine, not magic,” Sam said.  
  
“What’s that you always say? Magic is science we just don’t understand.” Dean didn’t feel nearly as confident as he sounded, and judging by the look Sam gave him, Sam knew it. “There’s gotta be an answer in the Bunker. You’re the one who’s always telling me that modern isn’t necessarily smarter, that ancient civilizations had information and technology that we’ve lost that was way more badass than what we have now. So maybe even if we don’t have the thing that zapped him, we can fix him anyway. More than one way to skin a cat, right?”  
  
“Right,” Sam said. He leaned against the window and closed his eyes.  
  
Dean popped Creedence Clearwater into the tape deck and hummed along to Run Through the Jungle and wished there was still someone he could pray to for help. They’d kidnapped a kid, and they might or might not have crazy military black ops guys on their tail.  
  
Awesome.  
  
And Ezekiel was still kicking around in Sam’s noggin.  
  
Damn. If Castiel found out about Ezekiel -  
  
No. One thing at a time. Cure Cas. Let Ezekiel cure Sam. Everything would be fine.  
  
Cas cried out in his sleep. “Mommy! _Mommy!_ ”  
  
Dean sighed. “Cas. Hey, Cas!”  
  
He whimpered.  
  
Dean tried another tack. “James Novak!”  
  
Cas’s eyes flew open, and his little chest heaved. Tears streamed down his face, but he said, Cas-bland, “What is it, Dean?”  
  
“Did you recognize those people who tried to kidnap you earlier?”  
  
“No, I had never seen them before, although the one woman’s voice was familiar. Naomi. The others called her Carter.” Cas huffed, cuddling the stuffed bunny some more.  
  
Bingo. “What about the others? What did Carter call them?”  
  
“She only called one of them Daniel. I heard no other names.”  
  
Daniel. That wasn’t a lot to go on. Assuming Samantha Carter wasn’t a made-up name (Dean and Sam had never tried to impersonate military personnel before, and he didn’t know of any hunters who could afford that level of gear), Google would have something on her. Something was better than nothing.  
  
“Thanks, Cas.”  
  
Cas yawned. “Can I go back to sleep?”  
  
No, that wasn’t Cas, plaintive and child-sweet. That was Jimmy.  
  
“Yeah, kiddo. Go back to sleep.” Dean had said it a hundred times exactly that way to Sam, crisscrossing the country with Dad and Baby.  
  
Cas closed his eyes, snuffled close to the bunny, and slid into dreamless sleep.  
  
  


*

  
  
Dean came awake just as Sam was parking Baby outside of the Bunker. Cas was still asleep in his booster seat, drooling on one of the bunny’s ears. Dean unbuckled him and carried him inside and, after some consideration, laid him on Sam's bed (his room was less full of weapons, and if Cas woke up while they were unloading the car, neither he nor Jimmy could accidentally shoot themselves).  
  
By the time Sam and Dean had unloaded the car, Dean was exhausted all over again. They got the food into the refrigerator and put all of Cas’s kid stuff in one of the spare rooms. When they peeked in on him, he was still asleep.  
  
“Should we move him?” Dean asked.  
  
“Nah, let him sleep here. I'll crash on his bed. We can swap going forward.”  
  
Dean nodded and started to close the door, put Sam held up a hand for a pause. He crept into the room, moving soundlessly, and set a brightly-colored plastic Walkie Talkie on the headboard beside Cas.  
  
“What the hell?” Dean hissed when Sam shoved a matching toy Walkie at him.  
  
“Baby monitor,” Sam said.  
  
Dean stared at the thing. It stared back at him with a single, unblinking red eye. “He’s not a baby. He’s, like, five. That’s old enough for kindergarten.”  
  
“He’s an angel stuffed inside a child’s body. You’re on Cas duty. I drove last.” Sam turned and headed for the spare room, leaving Dean standing in the doorway of the bedroom watching Cas sleep and watching the baby monitor glow.  
  
He sighed, turned, and went to his own room. Because he felt bad for Cas, he didn’t turn the baby monitor off before he set it on the nightstand, but he was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.  
  
As it turned out, he didn’t need a baby monitor to know if Cas was upset, because Little Cas had a primo set of lungs when he screamed in the night.  
  
Dean was jolted awake by high-pitched screams. A child. Whose child? Why was there a child in the Bunker? Why was a child screaming in Enochian?  
  
Cas. Cas was screaming.  
  
Dean staggered to his feet and stumbled down the hall to the source of the screaming. Sam’s room. Cas was sleeping in Sam’s room.  
  
Where was Sam? Sam was holding Cas, rocking him and patting his back, heedless of the way Cas was screaming in his ear, making gentle soothing noises. Dean stood in the doorway, trying to catch his breath.   
  
“Everything all right?” Dean asked.   
  
Sam stroked Cas’s hair, still rocking him. “It will be. Give him time.”  
  
Cas’s screams subsided to unhappy sobs, and he clung to Sam, entire body wracked with every panicked inhale.   
  
Dean stared at the remnants of his best friend, the nigh-indestructible soldier angel, reduced to a tiny body and tears. “I can't do this. Let's go find a cure.”  
  
“Right now?” Sam protested, gesturing at the weeping toddler in his arms.   
  
“Yes, now,” Cas said in a low voice. “This is intolerable.”  
  
“You okay?” Sam asked, peering at him.   
  
Cas wriggled down off of Sam’s lap. “Jimmy is unable to cope with some of my memories. And angels do not dream. The sensation is unsettling.” He padded for the door, his footsteps muffled by his Batman-themed footie pajamas.   
  
Sam and Dean followed him into the library, where he made a beeline for one of the lowest shelves, grabbed a book, and hauled it over to the desk. He climbed up on one of the chairs, flipped to the index in the back, and started searching.   
  
Sam and Dean looked at each other, sighed, and went to work. Dean grabbed a book off a high shelf, and Sam went to search through the card catalogue.   
  
“What search terms are you using?” Sam asked.   
  
“Does de-aging count?” Dean asked.   
  
“Try ‘age regression’ or ‘fountain of youth’,” Sam said.   
  
“Like El Dorado?” Dean asked.   
  
“It's an option,” Cas said. “Well, there was no actual city of El Dorado, but there have been youth-granting elixirs in the past. Usually they were destroyed to prevent disasters.”  
  
“For real?” Dean raised his eyebrows. “You couldn't tell us this sooner?”  
  
“A youth-granting elixir is not what I need.”  
  
“But maybe an antidote to an elixir is what will fix you,” Dean said. “Who made one of these elixirs?”  
  
“Nicholas Flamel, for one,” Castiel said.   
  
Sam spun around. “Nicholas Flamel was real?”  
  
Dean said, “Hey, I got a hit. Magical Chinese honey. Said to cure aging.”  
  
Sam rolled his eyes. “Aging isn’t Cas’s problem.”   
  
“What have you got?” Dean shot back.   
  
“The seed of life,” Sam said, “also known as the philosopher’s stone. Grants immortality.”  
  
“Yes, an immortal child is exactly what Cas needs to be. No one will look at him funny when we show up at crime scenes.” It was Dean’s turn to roll his eyes.   
  
“What of this?” Cas turned his book around. “A time-dilation device. It creates a space where the time inside it runs faster than in the outside world. If I were placed in such a space, I could regain my age.”  
  
“How big a space?” Sam asked. “Would you need supplies? Because you'd starve to death before you reached adulthood.”  
  
Dean peered at the book. “I’m sorry, did you say ‘device’?”  
  
“From the Lost Civilization of Atlantis.”  
  
“Atlantis is a myth,” Dean said.   
  
Sam crossed the library to peer at the book. “Maybe not.”  
  
“What makes you say that?”  
  
“Henry. He said the symbol of the Men of Letters, the Aquarian Star, was on the gates of Atlantis.” Sam tapped the front of one of the folders scattered across the desk.   
  
Dean pressed his lips into a thin line at the mention of Henry Winchester. “Right. Okay. Let's find us a lost island.”  
  
Sam went to brew some coffee, Dean began scouring the Internet for anything and everything he could about Atlantis, and Cas pushed a step ladder over to the card catalogue and began searching.  
  
Sam returned ten minutes later with two mugs of coffee, one of which he gave to Dean. He went to join Cas at the card catalogue, then paused.  
  
“Cas,” he said, “I know the body you’re in belongs to a child, but he's old enough to read.”  
  
“You’re stating the obvious.”  
  
Dean lifted his head. Sam was wearing that hesitant expression, the one he wore when he wanted to be nice but severe idiocy was happening in his presence and he had to stop it. He rarely wore that expression, patient as he was, but then he was always more patient with civilians than with other hunters. He was also probably crabby about being woken up in the middle of the night by a screaming kid.  
  
“Why are you looking for Atlantis in the L section?”  
  
“Atlantis is not the only Lost Continent in legend,” Castiel said. “I am looking for references to Lemuria.” He was picking through the cards very carefully with his tiny hands, stretched up on his tip-toes to see into the drawer.   
  
Sam raised his eyebrows. “Okay. What other lost lands are there?”  
  
“Shamabala, Hyperborea, Thule.”  
  
Dean blinked. “Like the Thule Society?”  
  
“Maybe,” Cas said absently. “I was not aware Thule had a modern society.”  
  
“Wait, so Thule was real?” Dean opened another tab and began searching.  
  
“I honestly didn't pay too much attention to goings on on Earth between my brief forays into humanity. I know the basics - the Bible was mistranslated in places, Eve was not Adam’s first wife - but the small things are inconsequential.”  
  
“Not so inconsequential now,” Sam pointed out. “So, Atlantis?”  
  
“Not an actual continent. I do believe there was once a city by that name, but I don’t think it stuck around, as they say.” Cas grasped a card, hopped down off the step stool, and headed into the stacks.  
  
“Wait,” Sam said, starting after him, but Dean shook his head. “An actual city named Atlantis?”  
  
“As I said, I am not very clear on the details. I am a soldier, not a Watcher,” Cas called over his shoulder.  
  
Sam went to follow him.  
  
Dean said, “He’ll be fine. He can look through a few books. They won’t kill him. And he’ll holler for help if he needs it.”  
  
Sam frowned.  
  
“They’re just books,” Dean said.  
  
“You weren't there for those cursed porn mags,” Sam muttered, but he went digging through the card catalogue in the A section anyway.  
  
As it turned out, there was about as much on the Internet about Atlantis as there was about UFOs. Dean was mildly alarmed at how lost continents factored into the musings of one Madam Blavatsky, who was some kind of court psychic for high-ranking Nazis back in the day, but that might have explained the whole Thule Society thing.  
  
Dean was elbow deep in a conspiracy theory website about how the United States Air Force had discovered Atlantis and sent a team of soldiers and scientists to it on a one-way trip under the sea deep in the Mariana Trench, and all of them had drowned and their corpses were haunting the ocean floor when he realized.  
  
He hadn’t seen or heard Cas in - he glanced at his watch - two hours.  
  
“Sam, where’s Cas?”  
  
Sam blinked muzzily, like he’d fallen asleep, but Dean knew he’d been up to his ears in reading. Sam’s ability to focus on one thing for hours was uncanny. “What? He just went to check on a book about Lemuria.”  
  
Dean rose up. “It’s been two hours, Sam.”  
  
Sam checked his watch, swore.  
  
“We’re officially the worst parents ever,” Dean said, and Sam grimaced. They grabbed their phones and split up without a word. They were a team, and they’d work as a team to find Cas. Dean figured he’d probably fallen asleep in the stacks. They could bundle him up and take him back to bed.  
  
Dean was passing the shelves full of Indian and Persian magic when he felt it, the thrum of magic in the air. He called Sam.   
  
“Sammy, are you working some kind of child-finding mojo?”  
  
“You felt that too?”  
  
Dean swore. “It’s Cas.” And he took off running.  
  
At the back of the library, in the middle of the aisle, Cas had made a mess of books. They were open and scattered around him, held open by book ends and a bottle of ink and a shoe. And there were spell ingredients littering the floor, broken jars and torn-open baggies and crumpled envelopes.  
  
Cas - tiny, solemn-faced, wearing freakin’ footie pajamas - stood in the middle of a carefully-drawn, if wobbly spell circle lined with sigils and herbs and silks and...was that a bone? Cas was chanting in something that sounded like Latin.  
  
Sam arrived moments later, breathless and wide-eyed. “What’s going on?”  
  
“I found a map,” said Cas. “To Atlantis. Now I just need to open the portal.”  
  
“Cas, you can’t go alone,” Dean said.  
  
Sam knelt, picked peered at one of the books. “Wait, no -!”  
  
Brilliant blue light exploded upwards and outwards. Dean swore and threw himself backward. Sam lunged at Cas to tackle him out of the way, but the light grew brighter, brighter, was blinding, and Dean closed his eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

Dean opened his eyes. He was warm and damp. The floor was - not floor. He opened his eyes. He was lying on the ground. Leaves and dirt made for a lousy pillow. He rolled over and stared up - at massive trees. He’d never seen anything like them before. Sam was lying a short distance away, curled around Cas, who was also unconscious.  
  
Dean listened for hints of anyone nearby, enemies or predators. But all he could hear...was the ocean. He pushed himself up to his knees, but the undergrowth was expansive. He rose up to his feet, peered, and he saw a sandy coastline and deep blue waves. Definitely not Kansas. Especially since palm trees dotted the beach.  
  
Sam woke while Dean was still trying to figure out where they hell they were. It was night, and the stars were bright, brilliant. The constellations looked familiar enough, and after a bit of spinning nervously, Dean located the North Star.  
  
“Where are we?”  
  
“We’re on an island,” Dean said. “A tropical island. I think - I think Cas actually did it.”  
  
“Cas, buddy, wake up.”  
  
Cas made a small, unhappy sound. “Mommy?”  
  
“Not Jimmy, Cas,” Sam said firmly.  
  
“Where are we?” There, that was Cas.  
  
“I think we’re on Atlantis,” Dean said. He rubbed his hands. “So, let’s get Cas un-shrunk and then head home.” He turned and smiled hopefully at Sam and Cas. Sam knelt and dusted off Cas’s pajamas.  
  
“Did you bring the counterspell?” Cas asked.  
  
Dean paused. “What counterspell?”  
  
“I cast a spell to bring us here. We need a counterspell to get home.” Cas gazed at Dean, blue eyes unblinking.  
  
“What did the counterspell look like?” Dean asked.  
  
“A hex bag,” Cas said. “I made sure to prepare it before I cast the spell.”  
  
Sam sighed. He fumbled in his shirt and held up a ragged piece of potato sack that had once been tied in a ball but had burst open. “This wouldn’t have been the counterspell, would it?”  
  
Cas fixed him with an unimpressed stare. “You crushed it.”  
  
“I was trying to save you,” Sam said.  
  
“I am trying to save myself, and you foolishly interfered.” Cas craned his neck. “Now, where is Atlantis?”  
  
“We’re on Atlantis. It’s an island,” Dean said.  
  
“Atlantis is also a city,” Sam said. “It has gates. Remember what Henry said.”  
  
“Yeah, fine. Let’s get to higher ground, scout, see what we can see.”  
  
“And find some water,” Sam muttered. He scooped up Cas, who didn’t protest, and settled Cas on his hip, one arm under him to keep him up, and they set off for the beach. All water eventually ran to the sea, so their best chance of finding something to drink would be to walk along the coastline. Not to mention Dean wanted to get a better sense of how big the island was, where on Earth they were, and whether there were other islands nearby or boats coming by, so they could escape if they needed to.  
  
“What have you got?” Dean asked. “As far as supplies.” He had his clothes, his watch, his cell phone, and his favorite knife, and that was it.  
  
Sam, by contrast, was barefoot. “My phone. My knife.”  
  
There was a lot they were capable of with knives. Dean nodded. “Okay. What do we need?”  
  
“Food, water, and a way home.”  
  
“Turn your phone off, save the battery,” Dean said.  
  
Sam shifted Cas, held him awkwardly with one hand, and reached into his pocket, powered down his phone. “If we even get cell service out here.”  
  
“If there’s a signal to be had, we can make an emergency call. What do you know about Atlantis? According to the Internet, it was built by aliens, or by angels, or by nephilim, or ancient giants, or just the ancient Greeks who were better and wiser than us. All the stories say pretty much the same thing, though, about how it ended. It sank. Because the Atlanteans got too big for their boots. Made something too dangerous to control. Can’t tell if it got sunk because of the thing they made or the gods sunk them.”  
  
Sam sighed. “Given what we know, either is equally likely.”  
  
“What else do you know, Cas?” Dean asked.  
  
No answer.  
  
“He’s asleep,” Sam said softly.  
  
Dean sighed. By his estimation, it took them all of fifteen minutes to walk down to the beach. The sand was pure white and unmarred by footsteps in both directions as far as he could see. Dean didn’t know enough about tides and gravity to know whether the water was at low tide or high tide. Up in the sky, the moon was waxing half. They hadn’t traveled through time, then. Just space.  
  
Dean scanned the horizon, but there was nothing in sight - no other islands, no ships, not even any buoys. He turned - and stared. Rising up from the mass of green canopy was a volcano. Definitely a volcano, because there was a crater at the top.  
  
“Is there any chance Atlantis was sunk by an erupting volcano?” Dean asked.  
  
Sam kept his voice low so as not to wake Cas. “It’s entirely possible. Oftentimes gods controlled natural phenomena, so one could have used a volcano to sink Atlantis. Why?”  
  
“Because there’s a volcano on this island.”  
  
Sam spun around. “Son of a bitch.”  
  
“That’s my line. Looks like a good high point, though. Good vantage to do some recon.”  
  
Sam gaped a few moments longer, then shook himself out of it. “I vote we walk the coast first, get a sense of how big the island is. That’ll help us plan how to do grid search. And then we can find some water.”  
  
Dean nodded. He hunted up a stick, stripped the bark off of it, and planted it in the sand, hopefully far up enough that it wouldn’t get washed away to mark their starting point. Then he picked up another stick, stripped the bark off of it, and they set off walking, Sam taking point and scouting for threats or resources, Dean counting his paces and making a notch in the stick for every hundred paces.  
  
Dean had just made it to another iteration of twenty-three when Sam said, “Water.”  
  
“Remember twenty-three,” Dean said. He eyed the pool. It was serene and clear, with water trickling into it on one side and then flowing out the other, toward the ocean. It was the kind of pool featured in commercials for ridiculously overpriced bottled water. If it was good enough for hipsters, it was good enough for Dean, who couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten or drank.  
  
He handed Sam his counting stick - Sam looked alarmed for a moment, adjusted Cas on his hip and then accepted the stick - and dropped to his knees, cupped his hands, and reached into the water.  
  
Something long and sleek and dark shot out of the water and snapped at his face.  
  
Dean fell back with a cry.  
  
“What the hell was that?”  
  
“It looked kinda like an eel,” Sam said.  
  
Dean scrambled backward, drew his knife, but the pool was empty. Clear.  
  
“I’m thirsty,” Cas said.  
  
“Wait.” Sam’s tone was implacable. “Hey, ow, Cas, don’t, I’ll drop you -”  
  
There was a tiny snarl and a hissed curse and then Cas, still wearing his Batman footie pajamas, crouched down next to the pool and leaned over to scoop water into his mouth for a drink. Dean lunged at him, snatched him away just as the serpentine creature leaped out of the water at him.  
  
Cas wailed.  
  
No, not Cas. Jimmy.  
  
Sam drew his knife and approached the pool warily. “There’s nothing in there.”   
  
“Maybe it has some kind of hiding place or camouflage,” Dean said. He patted Cas’s back, and Jimmy’s wails subsided to frightened hiccups.  
  
Sam dropped a pebble into the pool. Nothing happened.  
  
“We don’t know where we are, if any of the animals are poisonous or not,” he said. “Let’s move on.”  
  
“I’m thirsty,” Cas protested.  
  
“It’s too dangerous,” Dean said. It was hard to look into that teary little face, those big blue eyes, and think that the person behind them was an angel who’d existed for millennia, possibly longer.  
  
Sam caught Dean’s eye, nodded toward the coastline ahead, and Dean nodded back. “We’ll try at the next pool.”  
  
Sam sheathed his knife and hunkered down, held out his arms to Cas. “Want to ride on my shoulders?”  
  
Cas eyed him for a moment, then assented, scrambled up Sam’s back and settled on his shoulders. Sam rose up carefully, keeping hold of Cas’s legs, and reminded Cas not to pull on his hair.  
  
“You are incredibly tall,” Cas said. “Not as tall as Goliath of Gath, but incredibly tall all the same. The view from up here is...enlightening.”  
  
“What number was I on?” Dean asked.  
  
“Twenty-three.” Sam handed him the tally stick. He patted Cas’s leg absently. “You’re probably taller than even Goliath up there, buddy. Dean used to let me ride on his shoulders all the time when I was a kid. It was fun. Dad let me ride on his shoulders sometimes, too. I felt like I was on top of the world.”  
  
Dean remembered riding on Dad’s shoulders. He hadn’t done it much, after Mom died. He’d always felt safe, grounded on the breadth of Dad’s shoulders, but like he was flying, so high above everyone else.  
  
“I’ve danced across the rooftop of the world,” Cas said. “And I miss flying.”  
  
He started to cry again.  
  
How did the kid have so many tears? How had they not all dried up? Dean forced himself to keep counting paces, making his tally. Out of the corner of his eye, the volcano loomed large. They needed to find water first, food second. There was an ocean out there. Fish would be easy. But where were the palm trees? Coconuts would be handy. They could drink out of them, crack them open and scoop out the meat. Use them as dishes. Maybe tie half a coconut shell to a stick and use it to ladle up water? Maybe that would prevent them from getting bitten by any more hostile eels.  
  
Sam hummed quietly as he walked, and atop his shoulders, Cas was falling asleep, chin drooping to his chest.  
  
Dean made a warning sound, and Sam directed a glance upward. He paused, shifted Cas around, and settled Cas at his hip once more, guiding Cas to rest his head against Sam’s shoulder.  
  
The sand gave way to hard-packed dirt, and the walk turned into a steep climb. Cliffs. Damn. Dean peered at the sheer drop, but he kept counting his paces, making sure he didn’t lose sight of the ocean. How big was this island anyway? Was it really Atlantis?  
  
“You think this is really the place?” Dean asked.  
  
“No.”  
  
Dean sighed.  
  
“There’s not even a hint of human presence. People who can manipulate the laws of physics to create a time dilation field or other machine to shrink a child would be massively technologically advanced. If there were people here, I’d guess they were pre-technological.”  
  
“Or post-technological,” Dean suggested.  
  
Sam raised his eyebrows. “Really?”  
  
“What? I watch sci-fi.”  
  
Sam huffed and shook his head, patted Cas’s back absently. “Either way, there’s no sign of people here at all.”  
  
Dean’s heart sank. How were they supposed to get home? For half a second, he considered praying for help from another angel. Ezekiel had been friendly. What about Ezekiel himself? Did he have the power to get them home? Or heal Cas? Only Ezekiel had warned Dean that if Dean kept calling in angel favors, Sam would never get better. Cas didn’t know about Ezekiel, and Dean wouldn’t have a great way of explaining how he got them home if Ezekiel did help them. He couldn’t jeopardize Sam’s healing if Sam freaked out and kicked out Ezekiel.  
  
Dean squinted at the volcano and wondered how far away it was. He glanced down at his tally stick. It was almost completely full up one side.  
  
They crested the cliff and started to descend again, and Dean’s aching feet were glad, but his aching thighs protested. He glanced at Sam, who was barefoot, but Sam didn’t even seem to care, though he was picking his way along very carefully. Cas was sleeping soundly, but really, could life get any worse?  
  
(It could. Dean still dreamed of chains, of knives, of Hell.)  
  
(Sometimes he dreamed of Sam swan-diving into The Cage, Adam-Michael with him.)  
  
With every crash of the waves against the shore, Dean’s throat _itched_. He was thirsty. He spotted another clear trickle of water, told himself to remember forty-two, and signaled Sam. Together they turned away from the beach and followed the water inland until - yes. Another pool.  
  
It was bigger than the last one, but just as serene and clear. Dean tossed a pebble in, waited for an eel to strike. Nothing. So he knelt down and cupped his hand, reached into the water.  
  
“Dean!”  
  
Dean jerked back, startled by the wet black head that broke the surface of the water, jaws snapping, beady black eyes glaring.   
  
Dean swore. Cas came awake with a whimper.  
  
“Mommy? What’s going on?”  
  
“Nothing, Cas,” Sam said. “Just - the native fauna is unfriendly.”  
  
“Unfriendly?” Dean echoed in disbelief. “That thing just tried to kill me! Is every single damn pool on this island infested with vicious eels?” He peered at the water. “Where is the damn thing?”  
  
“Sam, put me down.”  
  
“Be careful,” Sam said gently. “Ground’s pretty rough.”  
  
Dean glanced at him. “You okay?”  
  
“Fine,” Sam said. “Look, maybe we should try to find another pool.”  
  
“No.” Dean cast around, found a good, fist-sized rock, and scooped it up. “We have no guarantee we’ll find fresh water again before the sun goes up. We’re somewhere tropical, and we won’t last a hundred hours in the heat with no water. Let me kill this thing.” He peered into the water, but there was no sign of the eel. “Where are you, you bastard?”  
  
“Cas, no! What the hell?”  
  
An unhappy child wail split the air, and Dean turned, saw Sam with an arm locked around a squirming Cas’s waist.  
  
“There’s an eel in there, like last time. You’ll get bit. Let Dean kill it.”  
  
“But I’m thirsty!” Cas sobbed.  
  
“I know, buddy.” Sam patted shoulder, grimacing. “We’ll get you some water soon.” He shot Dean a pleading look.  
  
“Hey, eel!” Dean shouted. He scanned the water, but there were no crevices or underwater caves that he could see. Where was the beast? He tossed a smaller pebble into the water, but there was no response.  
  
“Sam, leave Cas be. Get over here and be bait.”  
  
Sam turned Cas around, looked him in the eye. “Castiel,” he said firmly. “Wait right here.”  
  
Cas scrubbed a hand over his face and nodded sulkily.  
  
“Wake up, Cas,” Dean said. “Dust aside that Jimmy and help us out. We need to kill this eel so we can get you some water.”  
  
Cas nodded again, less sulky this time, but Dean didn’t trust the childlike sleepiness in his eyes. Maybe it was the footie pajamas, but it was damn hard to really believe that tiny person was Cas.  
  
Sam crouched down beside the pool. “What do you need me to do?”  
  
Dean hefted the rock. “Reach into the water in three, two, one -”  
  
Sam slapped at the surface of the pool. A dark eel head parted the surface of the water like a knife. Cas screamed. Sam swore and fell back, clutching his bleeding hand.  
  
Dean slung the rock hard and fast - he’d always had a good fastball - but the eel was gone.  
  
“Damn.” Dean scrambled to Sam’s side. “What if its bite is poisonous?”  
  
“Eel blood is toxic to humans, but cooking it renders it non-toxic,” Cas said, and finally, he was being useful.  
  
Sam did his best to wipe off the blood, but his skin was perforated by a dozen tiny bite marks.  
  
“And you can’t rinse it in the water.” Dean sighed. “How’s it feel, Sammy?”  
  
“Like an eel just tried to rip my hand off.” Sam’s tone was light but his expression was grim. He shrugged off his flannel over-shirt very carefully and wrapped it around his injured hand. “Plan B - sharpen a stick, and spear the sucker.”  
  
Dean nodded, fished his knife out of his pocket, and cast about for another stick. Cas started toward the water wearing a determined expression. Nope. “Cas, go help Sam. Put pressure on the wound. In fact, Sam, you sit down, put your hand in your lap, and let Cas sit on it. That’ll stop the bleeding.”  
  
Sam looked puzzled, because that was nowhere in the Winchester First Aid Handbook, but Dean raised his eyebrows pointedly, so Sam obeyed, and Cas plopped down on Sam’s hand and said, very solemnly, “This will stop the bleeding.”  
  
Dean sharpened the stick quickly and efficiently. He was good at sharpening sticks, had sharpened many of them for his father as one of his early knife dexterity exercises. The lower forty-eight was littered with sticks Dean had sharpened with his first knife. Sharpening a stick now took barely a thought, so while he worked, he planned. The eel was fast and it bit damn hard, and it only responded to human bait. Sam needed at least one good hand. Using Cas as bait was out of the question. Dean couldn’t afford to be down a hand.   
  
Once the stick was sharpened into a serviceable enough spear, Dean shrugged off his denim overshirt, wrapped it around his off-hand, and crouched down at the edge of the water. He scanned the pool, but it was dim enough, dark enough that he couldn’t be sure if the eel was there or not. Given the full moon and the convenience of the clearing they were in and how clear the water was, the pool looked empty of anything but mud, rocks, and plants, but Sam’s bleeding hand put paid to that illusion.  
  
“All right, you slimy bastard,” Dean muttered. “Here goes.”  
  
He dipped his hand into the water, yanked it right back out.  
  
No eel.  
  
“Okay, that thing is too smart. Something’s not right.”  
  
Cas said, “I do not believe it is an actual eel.” He clambered off of Sam’s lap and started toward the water.  
  
“For cryin’ out loud, Cas,” Dean said, but Cas leveled an unimpressed look at him.  
  
“I won’t try to touch the water. I just want to see.” And Cas leaned over, peered into the water.  
  
Dean twitched his spear, ready to stab the eel when it appeared.  
  
But the sleek head that broke the surface of the water was...human. Belonged to a teenage boy, black-haired, dark-skinned, symmetrical. Beautiful. His lips parted, and he spoke.  
  
“ _E pupula mai, ou mata o le alelo!_ ”  
  
“Cas, what does that even mean?” Dean asked.  
  
The boy repeated the incomprehensible words.  
  
“But I am an angel,” Cas said to the boy, frowning.  
  
The boy repeated the words again.  
  
“I have no grace, but I assure you, I am an angel,” Cas said.  
  
The boy shook his head, eyes wide, pleading, repeated the words again and again.   
  
Cas’s brow furrowed in frustration. “I do not understand. Let us drink the water, and we will stop looking at you.”  
  
The boy yowled and tossed his head, and suddenly he was an eel and he was snapping his jaws at Cas. Dean snatched him back, and then little Jimmy was sobbing into his t-shirt, and they still had no water.  
  
Sam took a deep breath. “Okay. Plan C.”  
  
“Plan C?” Dean echoed. “More like Plan F, as in we’re f-”  
  
“The eel didn’t care when your hand was covered,” Sam said. “Strip off your shirts, dip them in the water, and we can drink that.”  
  
Dean wrinkled his nose, but Sam said, “It’s better than nothing.”  
  
Dean stared at Sam, Sam stared back at him, and then Dean shucked off his shirts, helped Sam squirm out of his remaining shirt, and went to the water to dunk them, careful not to put his skin into the water.  
  
And, surprisingly, the shirts were unharmed by any creepy teenaged boys or vanishing eels.  
  
“Cas,” Sam was saying, “what did the boy say to you?”  
  
“He told me I was staring at him with eyes like a demon,” Cas said. “At best I have an angel’s eyes, at worst a human’s. I am no demon.”  
  
“Eyes like a demon,” Sam murmured, repeating the phrase to himself. “Dean, what if we exorcise the water? Or - or bless it?”  
  
Dean finished soaking Sam’s t-shirt - let him drink from it, the nasty sweaty gigantor - and started dipping his outer shirt into the water. It would be the least gross of the three. “What makes you say that?”  
  
“If the eel is some kind of water demon, maybe an exorcism will help,” Sam said.  
  
Dean nodded. “Yeah. Okay. But water first.” He helped Cas wring some water into his mouth - Cas’s hands were so small, and most of the water ended up on his face, which ended in him sneezing indignantly, but eventually Cas subsided into sucking on a corner of Dean’s t-shirt.  
  
Sam drank from his own shirt, so Dean drank from his, and maybe there was something to those bottled water commercials, because Dean was pretty sure this was the best water he’d ever had. Maybe that was the thirst talking.  
  
Once they’d all had their fill, Dean considered the problem of the eel in the pool. Bless the water and get the eel, or just exorcise the eel? An exorcism only worked if the demon could hear, though. Bless the water, then.  
  
Only Dean had no crucifix or rosary. Well, necessity was the mother of invention. He made the sign of the cross with his hand, murmured the prayer, and there. Yes. The water began to roil, like it was boiling, the way holy water did when it was flung on a demon.  
  
“What’s going on?” Cas asked.  
  
“I blessed the water. Should rustle up the eel demon in no time.” Dean readied his make-shift spear, scanned the surface of the water.  
  
The eel broke the surface, shrieking. It writhed and twisted, smoke rising off its skin. As it moved, it shifted from boy to eel and back again, one form melting into another. It flopped into the water. It was on its feet, wading toward them. It collapsed into the water as its legs dissolved. The whole time, it screamed and screamed and screamed.  
  
Dean made an executive decision. He threw the spear.  
  
It lodged solidly in the boy’s chest, but then the boy turned into an eel and the spear fell from empty air into the boiling water.  
  
“Dean,” Cas said, “I don’t think that was a good idea.”  
  
The eel-boy shrieked and writhed and rose up, levitating in the air, twisting and turning on itself all the while, as the water boiled and bubbled.  
  
Lightning split the sky.  
  
Thunder rolled, and rain began to pour down.  
  
“I believe that is the eel’s doing,” Cas said.  
  
Lightning struck the ground less than a yard from where Sam was standing.  
  
Sam looped an arm around Cas’s waist and took off running. Dean followed. Sam charged upstream, Cas flung over one shoulder and protesting the entire way. Sam wasn’t going as fast as he could’ve - the ground was muddy and slippery, he was barefoot.  
  
But Sam found a tree soon enough and hunkered down under it, Cas held close.  
  
“Well,” Dean said, shivering, “at least we don’t have to dip our shirts into any water if we want a drink.”  
  
Sam had chosen a tree that wasn’t nearly as tall as some of the others nearby, so if lightning struck, it would hit another tree first.  
  
Thunder cracked seemingly right overhead, and Cas whimpered, buried his face in Sam’s chest. Sam patted his back absently.  
  
“Well damn,” Dean said. “I’ve never seen a demon do that before. I mean, sure, lightning storms, but a friggin’ tropical monsoon?” Still, he hung his t-shirt on a branch to collect rainwater.  
  
Cas flinched every time lightning flashed and thunder rolled, but eventually he edged back from Sam, started plucking at the zipper of his footie pajamas.  
  
“These are wet and uncomfortable.”  
  
Sam unzipped them with his good hand, helped Cas step out of them, and then Cas was crouched beside him in nothing but a little pair of Batman underoos.  
  
“You should rinse your hand,” Dean said.  
  
Sam nodded, unwrapped his hand with a flinch, and stuck it out into the rain, wincing all the while. The bleeding had more or less stopped, but when Sam tugged off the makeshift bandage, it started up again.   
  
Dean used his knife to shred Sam's already ruined over shirt, and once Sam’s hand was clean he shuffled closer, tied strips of flannel over the wound so Sam would have a bit more dexterity than the wadded-up shirt had allowed.  
  
“So,” Sam said, “what’s plan D?”  
  
“Now that the immediate problem of drinking water has been solved,” Dean said, “I vote we go back to Plan A - scout the perimeter, then find good high ground and scout for any sign of civilization. We grow Cas, and then we go home.”  
  
“I still have the remains of the hex bag,” Sam said, patting his pocket. “Maybe we can improvise a little bit.”  
  
“Maybe,” Dean said, but he was doubtful. “In the meantime, let’s wait out the rain.”  
  
Sam nodded and scooted back, rested against the tree, and closed his eyes. Cas cuddled up next to him, shivering, and Sam slid an arm around him, the gesture almost unconscious, and then Cas closed his eyes.  
  
Dean could take first watch, give Sam a chance to heal up a bit from that nasty eel bite. Hopefully the storm would stop soon. As suddenly as it had come on, it couldn't be short-lived.  
  
And then he heard it.   
  
_E pupula mai, ou mata o le alelo._  
  
Dean drew his knife - dammit, he should've made a new spear - and peered through the rain. He heard the eel boy’s voice again, those words.  
  
What if the eel hadn’t been talking about Cas? What if it had been talking about Dean, or Sam? What if it could see that Dean had been in Hell, been on his way to being a demon? Or that Sam had once drunk demon blood, still had a touch of old Yellow Eyes in him?  
  
Again with the strange chant.  
  
“Where are you?” Dean muttered.   
  
He edged out from under the tree’s branches. His foot splashed down in a puddle.  
  
Something closed over his ankle.  
  
“Holy -!” Dean whipped around, yanking his foot out of the puddle, and saw the eel staring at him with its horrifying silver eyes. It morphed into the boy, and the boy actually started to rise up out of the puddle, like the little girl from the Ring crawling out of a TV screen, and oh hell no.  
  
“Sam, wake up!”  
  
Sam came awake in an instant, shifted to his feet with Cas tucked under one arm. “What is it?”  
  
“The eel’s not dead.” Dean pointed. “We can’t bless the rain.”  
  
Sam assessed the situation, set Cas down, and hoisted himself up the tree.  
  
“The eel can travel from pool to pool, no matter how small,” Cas observed, starting toward the eel-demon-boy.  
  
“No pools where there’s no ground,” Sam said. “Cas, get over here.”  
  
Dean plucked Cas off his feet and hoisted him up into the tree with Sam. Cas wriggled, protesting the indignity, but then he was tucked under Sam’s arm and Sam was clambering to another wide bough to make room for Dean. Dean swung himself up into the tree just as the eel-boy snapped at his heels, and then he perched there, chest heaving, as eel-boy wailed and thrashed angrily. It couldn’t reach them, and that was what counted.  
  
After some more angry screaming, the eel-boy sank back into the water, having given up.  
  
“So,” Sam said, clutching Cas to him, “what now?”  
  
“Now we try to sleep,” Dean said. “You sleep. I’ll take first watch.”  
  
Cas peered up around them. “Will any pools form?”  
  
“I’ll shake the leaves once in a while,” Dean said. The pool on the ground that eel boy had popped out of was big enough for a human adolescent torso. Dean suspected that if water did manage to pool in a leaf, it wouldn’t be big enough for the eel to manifest, but he wasn’t taking chances. So he tied the top of his t-shirt into a knot, and he tipped a bough down, draining the water down into his t-shirt as some kind of water skin. And he drank.  
  
And he waited.  
  
And he watched.  
  
He checked his watch, and every half hour, he emptied more water into his t-shirt. He drank. By his watch, they’d arrived on Maybe Atlantis at around two in the morning, and now it was nearly five in the morning, though there was no sign of sunrise. Dean couldn’t tell if it was because of the heavy canopy, the rain clouds, or because they were in a different time zone from the Bunker. At six, Dean would wake Sam to take over watch.  
  
It was still raining steadily, but Dean thought it wasn’t quite as heavy as before. But since the rain was supernatural, Dean didn’t expect it to follow natural patterns.   
  
He snapped a thin branch off of a nearby bough and sharpened it into another spear. For good measure, he sharpened another for Sam and, perhaps against his better judgment, a smaller one for Cas. He kept filling his t-shirt with water - it was leaking slowly, so refilling it constantly was good - and drinking from it.  
  
Finally he said, “Sam, your watch.”  
  
Sam blinked, came awake slowly, yawned. Dean scanned him, looked for any sign of Ezekiel, but Sam nodded, held out Cas, who was still curled up and asleep.  
  
“The rain’s still going pretty steadily,” Dean whispered, accepting Cas.  
  
The kid was sleeping soundly, mouth open as he snored softly. He lolled against Dean’s chest, sleep-warm but shivering. Dean showed Sam the t-shirt waterskin, and Sam drank gratefully. Dean leaned back against the trunk, closed his eyes, and drifted into fitful sleep.  
  
“I’m hungry.”  
  
Dean jolted awake.  
  
“Sh, Cas, let him sleep,” Sam hissed.  
  
The massive weight on Dean’s chest squirmed, grew pointy angles that pummeled him. “But Sam -”  
  
“I haven’t seen anything that’s edible in our trek so far. Drink some more water,” Sam said.  
  
Cas began to cry.  
  
Dean sighed and opened his eyes, tightened his arm around Cas. “Hey, buddy, it’ll be okay. I got spears for you, me, and Sam. We can go fishing once the rain lets up.”  
  
“It’s just about let up,” Sam said. “We’d better get to high ground while we have the chance, see what we can see.”  
  
“You know,” Dean said, “this whole time, I haven’t heard a single peep or cheep. No animals, no bugs, no nothing. Just that damn eel. So I’m hoping fish actually exist out in the ocean, but I haven’t even seen any fruit either. This is an island. Where are the damn coconuts?”  
  
And Sam said, “Coconuts. Of course!”  
  
“I know, right? We could drink out of them. Eat them. Use them as water bowls. Bras.” Dean patted Cas’s back awkwardly, bounced him. “You’d like a tasty coconut, right buddy?”  
  
But Sam didn’t laugh, wasn’t listening. “Of course, the origin of coconuts.”  
  
Cas’s sobs subsided into hiccups, and he rubbed his tear-stained face. “Yes, of course.”  
  
“Of course what?” Dean demanded. “Coconuts grow on palm trees.”  
  
Cas blinked big, blue, watery eyes at him. “Yes, but where did the first coconut come from?”  
  
“It evolved from...primitive coconuts?”  
  
“We must get down from this tree,” Cas said. “If we appease the eel, we will have coconuts. Or perhaps more.”  
  
“Appease the eel?” Dean swore when Cas squirmed out of his grip and crawled along the bough.  
  
“Yes,” Cas said. He held his arms out to Sam. “Help me down.”  
  
Sam actually shifted so he could jump down out of the tree.   
  
“Sam, that eel tried to take off your hand. It tried to eat my face. It tried to eat Cas! How is appeasing it going to help us get home?”  
  
“It’ll get us some food,” Sam said. “And then we can make the trek up to the mountain and see if we can’t find Atlantis.” He landed in the mud, winced and shook one foot out, then held his arms out for Cas. “Jump, buddy.”  
  
“How do we appease the eel? Let it eat one of us?” Dean made a grab at Cas, but Cas flung himself into Sam’s arms with a little cry of joy. Sam settled Cas back on his shoulders.  
  
“In the legend,” Sam said, “the eel was in love with the girl and wanted her to kiss him, but she said -”  
  
“You stare at me with eyes like a demon!” Cas cried, giggling, and Dean cringed. Cas should never giggle, ever. Even if he was a cute little kid, it was disturbing.  
  
“So the village chiefs killed him and, as he was dying, he asked her to bury his head, and from his head grew the first coconut tree,” Sam continued.  
  
Dean sighed and jumped down out of the tree. “What? That’s whacked.”  
  
“I’m not sure it was literal,” Sam said. “But it’s similar enough to some native legends about corn, how the first corn grew from the dead and buried bodies of deities. You know, when you tap a coconut to drink it, there’s those three little divots at one end - it’s like an eel’s eyes and mouth. So when you drink from it, you’re kissing it.”  
  
Dean paused. “Are you saying one of us has to kiss the eel? Not it.”  
  
Sam rolled his eyes. “Don’t be such a child.”  
  
“I am a child,” Cas said. “I will kiss the eel. Sam, take us to a pond. The blessed one is tainted, so we have to find another.”  
  
To Dean’s vast horror, Sam obeyed. Dean followed along helplessly, clutching his hand-sharpened spears. The rain was letting up, and Dean was pretty sure the sun had risen behind the solid ceiling of grey clouds. According to his watch, it was 9 AM Kansas time. Dean knew the look Sam had gotten on his face when mention of the coconut occurred. It was one of those Dr. House moments Sam had occasionally, when the answer just came to him in a flash, when something Dean said triggered Sam’s brain to assemble a bunch of random puzzle pieces he’d had stored in his head the entire case but that had no connection prior.  
  
Dean trusted those Dr. House moments of Sam’s. Usually. But they were on some kind of distant island with a child version of human Cas (literally a baby, no longer in a trenchcoat). They’d barely slept, even by hunter standards. They were drinking water out of Dean’s tied-up t-shirt, they hadn’t eaten in forever, and they were planning on letting Cas kiss an eel demon. Sam’s judgment had to be a little warped right now. But then Dean was the one with the spears, was the only one whose physical capabilities were intact. If he really wanted to stop them, he could.   
  
Maybe he was just tired enough, just hungry enough, just crazy enough to follow them downstream, back toward the shore, so they could find yet another freshwater pool.  
  
They were trotting along the shore at a surprising pace - should they stop and try to catch some fish? - when suddenly Dean realized what was wrong with this plan.  
  
“Wait,” he said.  
  
Sam and Cas glanced back toward him at the same time, and it was disconcerting. For one moment, Dean glimpsed an alternate universe, in which Sam and his son were enjoying a pleasant walk along a beach.  
  
“Yes?” Sam asked.  
  
Dean blinked to clear the mad vision away. He needed food, and soon. “In the legend or whatever, the eel’s head is cut off and buried, and that’s what brings the coconut. So why should Cas kiss the eel?”  
  
“Look, the point of the legend isn’t that beheading was a necessary component to the creation of the coconut,” Sam said. He took on a familiar pedantic tone; Dean had no doubt Sam had studied this legend for some class at Stanford and not for a hunt. “What mattered was that the eel loved the girl and even though she repaid his love with violence, he sacrificed for her and gave her an everlasting gift - coconuts, which have a variety of uses beyond mere food.”  
  
“Coconut bra,” Dean said again, and was gratified when Sam rolled his eyes. Yes, the rain was clearing up, the clouds thinning. The sun, wherever it was, had definitely risen.  
  
“The eel can still give a gift without its own blood being shed,” Sam said. “In fact, accepting a gift without shedding his blood might net us a better gift.”  
  
“What, bigger coconuts?”  
  
“Perhaps,” Cas said, and someone really, really needed to teach him how to take a joke. He pointed. “There, water!”  
  
Dean hoped this worked, that they could use coconuts to store and carry water, that they could dry out their clothes, because little Cas was in for a world of sunburn if he didn’t get his onesie on soon. If that was too hot, he could probably rig some kind of outfit out of someone’s shirt.  
  
Sam followed the direction Cas was pointing, and there, another stream was emptying into the ocean. He turned, picking his way wincingly across the mud while Cas barked orders.  
  
Dean followed, knife ready in one hand, spears ready in the other.  
  
The pool they came to was deep and clear and as lovely as the ones past. Cas, by tugging on Sam’s hair, directed Sam to let him down at the edge of the pool. Cas promptly leaned out over the water - Sam snagged him around the waist to prevent him falling in - and said,  
  
“Eel! Hello?”  
  
Dean was ready for when the eel’s head broke the glass-like surface of the pond, ready to throw a spear or his knife or - something.  
  
But instead of snapping its jaws at Cas and Sam, the eel rose up further, turned into that beautiful boy. He rose out of the water, droplets sluicing down his dark skin. From the waist down he was still an eel, which was damn freaky.  
  
The boy spoke those incomprehensible words, and Cas reached out with one little hand, blue eyes solemn. “You don’t have the eyes of a demon,” he said, and leaned up, kissed the boy on the cheek.  
  
Dean remembered what Sam had said about the legend, how the eel had been in love with a pretty girl, was about to make a comment about how that was probably a little too G-rated to get the job done, maybe Cas should let a grown-up do it, let Sam take one for the team, and then the world went white.  
  
Dean’s last thought before he passed out was, _Damn, of course it was too easy._  
  
  


*

  
  
When Dean swam back to conscious and saw that eel-boy had become glowing octopus boy and was having an earnest conversation with a shirtless, bedraggled Sam and a tiny Cas in his underoos, he felt terribly disoriented and wondered if this was how Sam felt when he came out of Ezekiel being in control.  
  
“What happened?” He heaved himself to his feet - he’d apparently fallen into the mud on the banks of the pond when he’d passed out - and dusted himself off as best as he could. Mostly he ended up smearing the mud more.  
  
“ - Others of my kind punished me to eternal solitude,” eel-octopus-glowing-boy was saying. “By showing me the affection they said I would never have, I am free from their prison, and now I may join the others in Ascension.”  
  
“You’re welcome,” Cas said.  
  
Sam’s expression was wary. “What’s Ascension?”  
  
“A higher state of being,” glowy boy said. “I am grateful for you freeing me after ten thousand years of torment. I am weakened from the constant struggle for freedom, but before I go, I can grant you one gift. I can send you home, or restore Castiel’s vessel to adulthood. But I cannot do both.”  
  
Cas’s eyes lit. Dean lunged, clamped a hand over his mouth, and fought back a string of cursewords when Cas bit him.  
  
“Home, please,” he said.  
  
Glowy boy frowned at him. “I may only grant the request to he who saved me.”  
  
Cas stomped on Dean’s foot, which was pointless because Dean was still wearing his boots.  
  
“Cas,” Sam broke in. “We have almost no way to get home. Once we’re back at the Bunker, we can work on making you big again. But if you’re big again, we have no way to go home.”  
  
Cas squirmed away from Dean, expression mulish, and Sam said, “Cas. Castiel. Shake off Jimmy and focus. Think like the soldier you are. What’s the best strategic option?”  
  
Glowy boy looked amused.  
  
Cas took a deep breath, and Dean prayed for him to make the right choice.  
  
“Home,” Cas said.  
  
“Wait,” Sam said. “What can you tell us about Atlantis?”  
  
But glowy boy smiled, and they were enveloped in white light once more, only Dean didn’t pass out, and when the light faded, they were standing on the mess of the casting circle Cas had made.  
  
“Glory freakin’ hallelujah,” Dean said. “I’m taking a shower. Sammy, watch Cas.”  
  
Sam started to protest, but Dean didn’t give a crap, because he was tired, hungry, damp, and muddy, and Cas was still a child.  
  
The warm water helped ease the aching chill that had settled into his bones after hours and hours of rain, and clean clothes made Dean feel marginally more human. As a kindness, he went into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee and make some pancakes and bacon.  
  
“Sam,” he said, “go clean up. I’ll watch Cas.”  
  
There was no answer.  
  
Alarmed, Dean turned off the stove and headed into the stacks to find Sam. He didn’t have to go far. Sam was asleep in one of the massive wingback reading chairs, Cas sprawled across his chest, both of them snoring.  
  
Dean stared at them, and he knew what to do. They’d never find Atlantis. The Men of Letters weren’t all-knowing, hadn’t believed in the existence of actual angels. So he cleared his throat and said, “Hey, I’m letting you know. I need your help.”  
  
Sam’s eyes snapped open, blue light flaring in them, and he sat up. He paused, puzzled by the child on his chest, only he wasn’t Sam, he was Ezekiel.  
  
“Dean, we have spoken about this.”  
  
“Look, if you cure Cas, make him adult again, I’ll send him on his way. The sooner he’s gone, the sooner you’ll be safe again, without the other angels bothering you or him cluing in to you riding shotgun with Sam.”  
  
Ezekiel rose to his feet, arms around Cas awkwardly, and he set the still-sleeping Cas down on the chair.  
  
“This will set back our mutual healing.”  
  
“Just do it, Zeke.”  
  
“If you are sure.”  
  
“I am.” It really was a crap shoot, which angels would talk normal and understand pop culture - like Zachariah - or be weird and robotic - like Cas and Ezekiel.  
  
Ezekiel bowed his head, and Dean felt the thrum of power build in the air, and yeah, this was the lousy end to a lousy series of events. All’s well that ends well, they said. Dean was pretty sure that this would never end - the angels, the demons, the curses. Whatever other bigger and badder thing was waiting in the wings.  
  
But then Cas was an adult again, and in growing he’d burst out of his kid underoos, so Dean had to scramble to get a blanket, only Ezekiel was levering Sam’s body back under Cas so when Sam woke up it would appear Cas had re-aged spontaneously, and while Dean was tearing through the nearest bedroom in search of a blanket, he heard Sam’s surprised yelp, heard a thump, and when he skittered back into the library, Cas was in an indignant heap on the floor.  
  
Dean flung a blanket over Cas.  
  
“What the hell just happened?”  
  
“I guess the whole shrinking thing just...wore off,” Dean said lamely.  
  
Sam sighed. “Of course. A time-limited effect. Should’ve thought of that.” He grimaced, looked down at his own body as if it had betrayed him. “You watch Cas. I’m hitting the showers.”  
  
“Food will be ready when you get out,” Dean said.  
  
Sam shuffled away, favoring his left foot as he went.  
  
Cas said, “Thank you for the blanket. I should also shower.”  
  
“I’ll get you some clean clothes,” Dean said. He offered Cas a hand, and Cas made it onto his feet, clutching the blanket in place with his other hand. Dean would have to wash the blanket when Cas was done with it.  
  
“Thank you,” Cas said, “for protecting me while I was vulnerable.”  
  
Dean smiled tiredly and clapped him on the shoulder. In a few hours, he’d have to tell Cas to get the hell out again, to protect Sam. It was always to protect Sam. Till then, there was pancakes and bacon.


End file.
